The school offers several international legal programs, operates a variety of clinics, and publishes several law journals.

Classes were continued after the second fire in the basement of the Third Presbyterian Church until the universities first law professor, Walter H. Lowrie, was elected to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1851 and forced him to abandon his teaching at the school.

[4] This, along with the fires that destroyed many of the university's facilities and resources, disrupted the development of the School of Law.

The first classes in the permanently established school were conducted in the orphans' court rooms in the old Allegheny County courthouse.

[4] In 1936 the School of Law moved in its entirety to the 14-16 floors of the Cathedral of Learning on the main campus of the university located in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

News of Horty's pioneering work at Pitt inspired the Ohio State Bar Association (just across the state line in nearby Ohio) to create its own separate CALR system, the ancestor of the database system known today as LexisNexis.

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Admissions to the University of Pittsburgh School of Law are conducted on a rolling basis, with an acceptance rate of slightly less than 30%.

The survey took into account multiple factors, with success in job placement weighted most heavily at 35%, followed by tuition (25%), average indebtedness (15%), bar passage rates (15%), and cost of living (10%).